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[85] His doctrine is that all things are brought about by necessity and in harmonious inter-relation. He was the first to declare that the earth moves in a circle,
1
though some say that it was Hicetas of Syracuse.
He wrote one book, and it was this work which, according to Hermippus, some writer said that Plato the philosopher, when he went to Sicily to Dionysius’s court, bought from Philolaus’s relatives for the sum of forty Alexandrine
2
minas of silver, from which also the
Timaeus was transcribed. Others say that Plato received it as a present for having procured from Dionysius the release of a young disciple of Philolaus who had been cast into prison.
According to Demetrius in his work on
Men of the Same Name, Philolaus was the first to publish the Pythagorean treatises, to which he gave the title
On Nature, beginning as follows:
Nature in the ordered universe was composed of unlimited and limiting elements, and so was the whole universe and all that is therein.
Vitae philosophorum. Diogenes Laertius. R. D. Hicks (Translator). Cambridge, MA. 1925.
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